I've written about Brazil pre-Lula and post-Lula and spent the last five years covering all aspects of the country for Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Barron's. Meanwhile, for an undetermined amount of time, and with a little help from my friends, I will be parachuting primarily into Brazil, Russia, India and China. But will also be on the look out for interesting business stories and investing ideas throughout the emerging markets.

ObamaCare Is Constitutional; Get Over It

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: Ron Kirby holds a sign while marching in protest of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26, 2012 in Washington, DC. Thursday the high court said ObamaCare was Constitutional. Sorry Ron. (Image credit: Getty Images North America via @daylife)

The Affordable Care Act is officially Constitutional. It is time for the naysayers to move on.

Of course, we know that they won’t. Not because they don’t like health care, or affordable health insurance, or even mandates. But because not liking ObamaCare is a political rallying cry. It simply stokes the opposition. For no other reason, the opposition will hate ObamaCare and the Supreme Court decision on Thursday.

“We know that the act will help all people be more engaged to make better, more informed health decisions, and that’s a good thing,” says Leslie Kelly Hall, senior vice president of policy at Healthwise. She also serves in several capacities for the Health and Human Services committees in Washington DC.

People, we live in a society. There are laws. The government tells you to pay taxes. The police department says you can’t go through a red light. God says you cannot kill people. We live under mandates of what we can and cannot do, based on the good of society. You cannot run a red light because you might cause a traffic accident. You cannot avoid paying taxes because who will pay a soldiers salary? Who will keep your public school open? ObamaCare is the age old debate about whether everything should be private, or whether there is room for the common wealth.

While the mandate under the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect, it is far from a bad one. The market will not crash because of this.

Over time, Americans will be required to have health insurance. This means the whopping 50+ million Americans who have no health insurance, and therefore do not go to the doctor, will be required under the law to get some.

The number of uninsured has increased over the past decade, largely due to the struggling economy and resulting weak job market. Adults have experienced a larger increase in their uninsured rate compared to children. This difference is largely due to limited eligibility for public coverage among adults. Health insurance makes a difference in whether and when people get necessary medical care, where they get their care, and ultimately, how healthy people are. The consequences of reduced access to care over time can be serious, including preventable hospitalizations, poor overall health, disability, and premature death.

I don’t know all the minute details of the tax penalties the government will implement against those who do not have health insurance, but I do know one thing. The health insurance companies absolutely love this law. They just got a guaranteed customer base of at least 50 million. And guess what? Premiums will come down because of it. Under ObamaCare, your monthly health insurance premiums will now be affordable. I have no idea how people can claim that health insurers will suffer.

I live in Massachusetts. And here in Massachusetts, we live under the predecessor of ObamaCare — the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform Act, signed into law by former governor Mitt Romney in 2006. Under RomneyCare, as Rick Santorum supporters called it during the primaries, 98 percent of the state’s residents have affordable health insurance. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has not gone broke. It’s unemployment level is 6 percent this month, falling from 6.3 percent in April and better than the national average of 8.3 percent. No one is even considering overturning the 2006 law, sources from Blue Cross Blue Shield told me earlier this year. Mike Widmer, president of the non-partisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, told me the same thing when I was covering the New Hampshire primaries for Forbes. Companies are not going belly up because of RomneyCare. Private insurers operate in the state along side the non-profit health insurers like Harvard Pilgrim and Blue Cross Blue Shield. There have not been massive layoffs in the industry because of the law.

Over the five full fiscal years since the law’s enactment, the state has spent $91 million a year, well within the budgeted expectations. RomneyCare is not a budget buster, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation says.

As a result of the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform Act, I actually think that Mitt Romney would make a fine President, despite what Jesse “the Mind” Ventura told me in a phone call a few weeks ago, something about magic underpants. But I digress.

Romney happily signed the bill into law in 2006. He didn’t want to raise taxes on small businesses. The state legislature overruled him. Romney and the Democrats worked together on this law, despite the obstacles Romney put in their way. Their goals, however, were the same: let’s forget about healthcare costs for now and just make sure people have access to healthcare through affordable health insurance. The reason people don’t have access to healthcare is because they can’t afford health insurance. If you can’t afford health insurance, you don’t go to the doctors. In Massachusetts, everyone can afford health insurance. And with the mandate, there are more people on board. More people on policies. More people on policies means more money for insurers, but it also means more money for the state to dish out to the poor and self employed who qualify for state care under MassHealth. Still, no muni bond investors in the state of Mass worried about not receiving their coupon payments twice a year, or their principal back.

Healthcare costs in the state are not coming down, of course. They are still rising. But just as the price of a new Mercedes Benz and Audi go up every year, so do legal costs, doctor salaries, and equipment costs at Massachusetts’ world class hospitals.

A friend of mine, whom I drive to Mass General Hospital for chemotherapy once in a while, told me that the average chemo cocktail costs around $15,000. Imagine that, once a week. Cancer causes health care costs to rise, too, not just poor people with gunshot wounds.

My daughter has a mild form of epilepsy. If not for RomneyCare, I could never have afforded her treatments, month long at one point in 2010. She was taken care of at Boston Children’s Hospital. The Rolls Royce of Children’s Hospitals. That’s why it is expensive; it’s a Rolls. It’s the best. The question is…do you believe Americans should have access to the best, or even some modicum of good, or do you think that they should not simply because health insurance premiums are prohibitive? One way to make health insurance costs drop is to give health insurers access to more clients…guaranteed. If that’s socialism, it’s not much different than the state-support of capitalism that we have seen in the U.S. and worldwide since Ayn Rand wrote “Atlas Shrugged”.

Another note…”Atlas Shrugged”…is fiction. We are dealing with reality.

When I left my job at Dow Jones in Brazil and returned to the U.S., I had one month of Aetna Global health insurance. The reality of that monthly bill came out to $1,100. I cancelled it immediately. I couldn’t afford it. Luckily, I live in Massachusetts. RomneyCare, I can afford.

Thank you Massachusetts Congress and thank you Mitt Romney for allowing me to afford taking my child to a hospital.

I don’t care what people say about Romney and his magic underpants. If it wasn’t for him, my daughters would be uninsured. So would I. Thank you, Mitt Romney.

Now, if I was a radical, I could reject the mandate and pay over $2,000 a year on my tax bill. Having health insurance, in my case and due to my income threshold, makes more sense. ObamaCare will be the same.

According to the fact checkers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the minimum tax assessment will be $695 per person and no more than $2,085 per family when the law goes into full effect in 2016. The amount can be higher depending on income. But there are exemptions for low-income persons and others. Find me a health insurance company that will charge you just $2,085 a year for health insurance. I dare you to find one that will charge you $4,000. In fact, if Americans could find one that’s not purely emergency medical that charged them just $4,000 annually, we wouldn’t have this high uninsured body count.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “For most Americans the amount due will be far less than the price of insurance, and, by statute, it can never be more.” Chief Justice Roberts is no liberal. But he upheld almost every single part of the Obama health care law, and wrote the majority opinion himself.

Why do I have a feeling that the Chief Justice is being bombarded with radical hate mail right now? Don’t open your mailbox, Mr. Roberts. Get a police robot to do it.

More facts from Fact Check.org, run by Annenberg: big government is not coming to knock your door down if you don’t get insurance and don’t pay the tax fee on your tax return. The law prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from seeking to put anybody in jail or seizing their property for simple refusal to pay the tax. The law says specifically that taxpayers “shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty” for failure to pay, and also that the IRS cannot file a tax lien or levy bank accounts.

So there. If you don’t want health insurance, then take it up with the IRS.

Why would you?

Only a radical would.

ObamaCare is affordable health insurance. ObamaCare is through private insurers, not just government insurers. ObamaCare is Constitutional. Get over it.

But they won’t. The opposition will repeatedly make this an issue. It’s meat. As Americans grow bored with gay marriage and even abortion to some extent, ObamaCare and big government is as good a war call as any in an election year.

Immediately after the Supreme Court said that the Affordable Care Act was within Constitutional law, the Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs had this to say: “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decision has completely unshackled the federal government of virtually any remaining limits on federal power over states and private individuals so long as Congress defines it as a ‘tax’. This was not what our Founding Fathers intended. We call on Congress to repeal Obamacare and work to enact real reform that makes health care more affordable and available by empowering consumers and expanding the free market – not government.”

So maybe the government can fight medical tech companies and tell them to stop making their minimally invasive surgical equipment so damn good and go back to cheap saws and ice packs?

This is not a Christian group. This is an anti-tax political group fronting for the Republican Party on hot button issues of the day. WWJD, my foot. They are not interested in your healthcare or what you pay for health insurance. They are interested in political narratives. Anyone who believes that zero taxes are the answer to all our problems will be hard pressed to find examples of how zero taxes have helped societies, anywhere. And, we are still a society, like it or not. We are still a Pride. And the human jungle has rules. You cannot kill people. You cannot run a red light with a drink in your hand and think a wink and a smile is going to keep you free from a ticket.

As Mark Karlin, editor of the Buzzflash blog wrote yesterday, “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now uncontested law, is not Obamacare. For many millions and millions, it is a lifeline.”

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If Republicans were to pass a piece of legislation that essentially outlawed abortion, and it went to the SCOTUS, and the SCOTUS upheld it as Constitutional, essentially overturning “Roe v Wade,” how would you accept it if Republicans then said, “It’s Constitutional. GET OVER IT. The Democrats need to sotp with their partisan complaining and just get with the program, it’s law now.”

PLEASE.

You could never reasonably expect the Democratic party to go along with something that goes fundamenally against their core philosophical beliefs. That is how Obamacare is to Republicans, ranging from the mandate to its taking a lot of control over healthcare, to the fact it could bankrupt the nation, and so forth.

And the Massachusettes program was going to be unsustainable had Obamacare been shot down by the Court. So if the Massachussettes program cannot survive on its own, how is the ACA going to survive on its own at the national level?

Groupthink at its finest… I do not need to choose a side to realize the symptoms. Like of awareness of situational factors of other sides, and dehumanizing the enemy by making subjective remarks. Have you ever wondered why most arguments devolve to calling the other stupid or childish?

You’re a fool. Your government just put into effect a law which is unconstitutional and you don’t bat an eye. The media have completely abandoned the majority of the American people and we don’t believe a thing you say anymore. If you even attempted to read the law, which I doubt you have, you would see that the point of the law was to seize control of a large portion of the American economy, not to deliver better health care. Tell me – why does a health care bill need to fund a private militia answerable only to the president? Why would it fund millions of new IRS agents to act as law enforcement in the event of non-participation? Why would it authorize government agents to seize money from your bank account? What color is the sky in your world, Mr. Rapoza? Read some history books and wake up to what is happening in America.

I have two daughters. I make a decent wage (no college degree, head a small business accounts payable department). My husband’s company offers health insurance, but at a cost that we simply can not budget in. My company does not offer insurance (because we can not afford it…I know this because I manage our company budgeting. Due to EPA regulations and changes in pricing on our material and big warranty companies already capped on what they will pay out regardless of our rising costs, it has become nearly impossible to make a substantial profit.. At best, we are staying afloat. At present costs, health insurance for our employees, myself included, would put us out of business..literally.) My concerns are basic. I don’t stand on either political side with a loud bandwagon, or believe the banter does any good for any of us. I would love affordable health care for everyone in theory. My example..My oldest daughter costs $287 a month (her grandmother pays for this). That coverage is only good for large incidences (ex, heart failure, surgery, etc). Otherwise, I have still spent largely this year with big deductibles for a staph infection, and multiple incidences of ‘bad cough and cold’. I spent $193 dollars on the medication for the staph, and the visit fee was $60 on a particular visit. Topped with an already $287 monthly bill, that was a big expense for my low income family. My youngest daughter (2yrs) does not have insurance. I spent $75 for her visit with ‘bad cough and cold’. The doctor understood I had no insurance and kindly gave me sample medication to help her through. I essentially spent less with my uninsured child, than my insured child. I tell all this to let you know that I, a likely considered low income family leader, would love to see the end of the healthcare struggle. This is my real life situation. I may not speak as eloquently, or be as eager to announce my well informed elitist intellect, but I am a citizen of this country, and pay my mandated taxes, stop at established redlights, suffer through bill fluctations, and so on. I do vote, so my opinion should be acknowledged. I would just like some simple explanations. Will Obamacare really allow the government to analyze my bank account? Will the healthcare plan truly give my husband, myself, and my two daughters the “mercedez benz” of healthcare at an affordable price for my personal home? I am curious if the amendments will ever begin to invade my private decisions, and then make rations on my health care. For instance, I maybe eat too much McDonalds, or I drink too many caffeneited beverages, take up smoking, etc. Will this EVER limit my coverage? That is my right winged true fear of my civil liberties being invaded. I would love, truly need, a better system to help my family with health care coverage, so even though I consider myself more right winged than left, if I have to label it, I am open to whatever color the best option would be. Also, I do believe it would make more sense to establish circumstantial programs state to state, monitored state to state. Just as someone who multi-manages, it seems more reasonable to me that your voices and needs could be louder approaching the state than the Federal government. I would like an explanation of why bigger is better. I am not being sarcastic. I would genuinelly like to know why people feel this is a better format to govern, not just Obama conversation. I just want some real, factual, dumbed down answers. I am open for truths, whether they or democratic or republican.

Voted constitutional is not the same thing as actually being constitutional in the same way that voting that the world is flat is different than the world actually being flat. Thankfully I don’t think we’ll ever have to trust the Supreme Court to make THAT decision.

Insurance is the CAUSE of high health care costs. Universal health care enrollment removes the supply and demand pricing, allowing charges as high as doctors want. Government should be providing low cost clinics, not insurance.

There is no way I can pay for this travesty. My retirement was planned around paying for my house. Greedy Democrats will make me sell my house. This just makes me hate government even more.

You know what , you can go ahead and think obama care is wonderful…but you arent the one who has to try to find jobs for people that cant get hired because of the type of disability they have which labels them as a liability! When your the one threatened to lose the only way to pay for the 564$ worth of pills you need every month because they dont see you as DISABLED under obama care then u come cry to me …everyone knows this damn site is paid off by the devil himself anyway! So i guess when my mother and i lose our disability income we will come move in with you because we wont be able to afford our home or our Seizure Medication…So that sounds like the plan …when my medication goes out the window , you “SHEEP” can take care of me Since i wont be coherent enough to anymore!